In the paper, some experimental and theoretical results concerning optical bistability in cholesteric liquid crystals are presented. A strong primary laser beam interacted nonlinearly with the material and influenced a second (probe) beam in such a way that its transmitted part exhibited a bistable dependence on the intensity of the first beam. It was observed that such a character may be attributed to the intensity of the outgoing probe wave. The obtained results reflect the symmetry of the sample and are interpreted as second order nonlinearity effects.
JavaScript is turned off in your web browser. Turn it on to take full advantage of this site, then refresh the page.